Research

Engineering, food security and drug discovery are just a few of the areas where Purdue has earned a world-class reputation for its research and is making a global impact. Professor Richard Kuhn, the director of the Purdue Institute for Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease is one of many Purdue faculty members engaged in such research. Kuhn’s research group was the first to determine the structure of the Zika virus in 2016, revealing insights critical to the development of effective antiviral treatments and vaccines. In January of 2017, his team determined the high-resolution structure of immature Zika virus, a step toward better understanding how the virus infects host cells and spreads.